Library or Media Center

What do you call it, library or media center? When I was growing up, there was no such thing as a media center. Our school had a library. There were books, magazines, newspapers and a card catalog to find it all. Strictly paper and ink, as far as the eye could see.

Then technology began to change. More than printed media was available to library patrons, and eventually even the beloved card catalog became a memory. And with that change in libraries, came a change in the name. School libraries decided (without even asking my opinion) to call themselves Media Centers, and librarians were now Media Specialists.

When I came to Fort Myers Christian School in 1987, there wasn't much of a library, just a few hundred old books from what used to be the church library, and not a card catalog in sight. I had just finished my degree in library and information science, and some of my instructors were so old, that they remembered having to take special classes to learn the proper penmanship to hand write a card in the card catalog (I'm so happy we had typewriters by the time I got my degree.) So, even though it was becoming the trend to call a school library a media center, I chose to be old fashioned. I was a librarian, and this was my library.

I pretty much continued in that mind set until one day a freshman at Fort Myers High who had graduated from our school came back to see me. I had seen the library at Fort Myers High; it was impressive compared to what we had back then. So, I asked her if she had been to the library yet. She said that she had not, but that she would check it out and report back to me. A week later I saw her again, and again I asked her if she had seen the library. She said that she hadn't seen it yet because she didn't know where it was. However, she saw signs in the hallway for the Media Center, and she thought the library might be close to the media center.

Part of me wanted to giggle, because they are the same thing, but a bigger part of me was ashamed that one of our students didn't know that they are the same, because I never taught her that they were the same. Well, that was the end of that. Starting that school year, I started calling our library the Library Media Center, and I (much to my own chagrin) had my name tag changed from Miss Shrader, Librarian, to Miss Shrader, Media Specialist.

So what do you call it?